Obesity isn’t a state of mind, it’s a problem

THE COLLAPSED DINING TABLE MATTERS ENORMOUSLY. — JOHN ROBSON

It looks as though Britain is nearly sunk. Not due to Brexit, spineless politicians, or a shredded defence establishment. The weight of the populace, especially the young.

Monday’s Daily Telegraph said “Millennials are set to be the fattest generation on record — with three quarters overweight or obese by the time they approach 40 … Analysis by Cancer Research UK shows that the six million Britons who came of age around the millennium are far more likely to have a weight problem than the baby boomers” whose 54 per cent figure, itself appalling, lags millennial by fully 20 points.

Before you stigmatize me for stigmatizing persons of size, the Telegraph adds “Experts said the figures were ‘ horrifying,’” because “obesity is now the second leading cause of cancer, second only to smoking.” In the PC universe where “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” the only problem with obesity is people’s bad attitude toward it. In the doctor’s office it’s a very different matter, from cancer to heart disease to complications during pregnancy.

I don’t mean to pile onto those who struggle with their weight, or should. I am one. But sympathizing with somebody’s problem does not require enabling their “denial” about it. Quite the reverse, especially since everybody knows excess pounds are bad for you. As the dyspeptic Dean Inge said, “We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.” And half these millennials would rightly call the Humane Society if they saw a dog or cat that looked like them.

It’s easy to dismiss as just more bourgeois prejudice or judgmentalism or some such slag du jour. But ads feature fit people even more consistently than intact families because people want to be trim and fit just as they want to get and stay married. Even millennials; in 2004 sociologist Reginald Bibby found 90 per cent of Canadian teens wanted to marry, have kids and never divorce. But less than half actually will.

No, I did not just digress. This tidal wave of obesity isn’t only an indication of health problems a short distance down the road. It shows that something is deeply wrong with their capacity to lead ordered, purposeful lives, also reflected in young Britons’ heavy binge drinking.

The kids are not alright, in Britain, Canada or across the Western world. You cannot dismiss so many young people drifting into so much trouble as “different strokes for different folks” and blithely maintain that we have arrived at the acme of social perfection or will as soon as the last reactionary is deplatformed.

Contributing factors clearly include sloth due to the uncontrolled experiment with sticking kids in front of tablets or smartphones for hours every day to tranquilize them for our convenience; ditto prescribing massive quantities of mind- altering drugs to mask symptoms rather than treat causes in schoolchildren; a flood of unhealthy processed food. Ah, at last. A chance to blame capitalism, “the system” or some such bogeyman.

Except even the increasing tendency to eat processed food, and feed it to our kids, is related to the recent disintegration of family life that is the main problem here.

Over a decade ago I was horrified to read in the National Post that “Family mealtimes are becoming so rare … that one in four British homes does not have a dinner table…” And British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, lamenting the inability of “intelligent and decent” students to grasp that eating in the street showed lack of restraint and, not coincidentally, accounted for most litter, wrote in 2003 “a large proportion of young Britons never eat in the company of others, except possibly in feral packs. Many of my patients … have never, in their entire lives, eaten round a table at home with other members of the family … ” Instead they feed wantonly, even “furtively,” like ( my analogy not his) the savage hero in One Million Years BC. Which isn’t progress.

The collapsed dining table matters enormously because children learn self- control and solidity of character in the family and, within it, at mealtimes. Or don’t. The problem is not lack of selfesteem, too much of which consumed raw turns kids into brats. It’s lack of justified selfesteem, which can only come from self-control. Without it life is mentally and physically unhealthy. And parents without it spell trouble for children.

I may be attacked for lacking compassion for persons of size, single parents, the differently abled etc. But let me be blunt: to ignore a problem because somebody else has it is not compassionate. It’s callous and selfish. And all family structures are not equally valid any more than all body shapes are.

If my explanation strikes you as reactionary tripe, how do you account for the mass of unhappy flesh under which Britannia now groans?